Traditional fantasy roleplaying games

Rich descriptors

One of the more surprisingly effective character creation innovations I have come across during the last several years was when Ram decided to add a set of random appearance results automatically to the default output from his character generator. For example: Thief, Male, Child, in Uniform, Tall is so much more immediately intriguing than just Thief, especially along with STR 4 and WIS 5.

But there is nothing special about those particular appearance tables, and if anything they are somewhat mundane, apart from one third of characters being either children or decrepit, which is rare for starting player characters and so lends interest. Maze Rats characters have more unusual descriptions, but are still relatively literal and immediate: wiry, singed clothing, and so forth.

What if we tried for more suggestive descriptors, such as roles or life stages? In the following d66 table, I tried for a set of results that in a single word suggest gender and age, along with a dash of social status, without being quite as direct. And of course, one could interpret a role either more or less literally. Depending on campaign particulars, reynard could mean young adult trickster or it could mean that the character was an actual fox who somehow was transformed into a human. Or maybe it means halfling animal person foxling.

The entries perhaps still need some tuning, but the idea seems promising, especially if a few such rich tables could be constructed. I avoided more mundane pairs such as father/mother, husband/wife, king/queen, and so forth. I also tried to select pairs that were somewhat quirky without being ridiculously obscure and tried to avoid pairs that involved explicit hierarchy, though without complete success. Columns control implied gender, with odd male and even female. Rows control implied age, with higher number meaning older.